Fiction Quotes - Page 23

• This is a collection of dexterous, loving, beautifully optimistic work that left me breathless and delighted.... Hannu Rajaniemi's magnificent science fiction - as is paradoxically appropriate - is pure magic.

  Amal El-Mohtar

  Optimistic, Magic, Breathless

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• In science-fiction films the monster should always be bigger than the leading lady.

  Roger Corman

  Monsters, Film, Leading Ladies

  Ed Naha, Roger Corman (1982). “The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget”

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• If people cannot be flawed in fiction there's no place left for us to be human.

  Roxane Gay

  People, Flawed, Humans

  "How we all lose" by Roxane Gay, therumpus.net. October 26, 2012.

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• And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.

  George R. R. Martin

  Sex, Philosophy, Reading

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• I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was.

  David Foster Wallace

  Jobs, Couple, Writing

  Source: www.nybooks.com

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• I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or ideas.

  David Foster Wallace

  Character, Thinking, Ideas

  Source: www.nybooks.com

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• If some people read my fiction and see it as fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be.

  David Foster Wallace

  Philosophical, Mean, Character

  Source: www.nybooks.com

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• I never have an alter ego in the movies. That's a fiction that the press has made up over the years, and it's fun to write that. It gives them something to write.

  Woody Allen

  Fun, Writing, Years

  "Woody Allen Discusses "Match Point"". Interview with Cole Smithey, www.colesmithey.com. December 20, 2005.

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• Everything of this life as a mortal is fiction. It seems real, but...

  Richard Bach

  Real, This Life, Seems

  "The Adventures of a Reluctant Student". Interview with Lee Stephen Gawtry, www.watkinsmagazine.com. May 16, 2014.

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• I would love to do more science fiction. I always envisioned the Riddick franchise as a continuing mythology, so I always imagined that there would be many other films to follow.

  Vin Diesel

  Would Be, Film, Mythology

  "Vin Diesel Talks RIDDICK, Balancing His Producer and Actor Roles, Making Good on Promises, HANNIBAL THE CONQUEROR, Future of Cinema, and More". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. August 28, 2013.

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• There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth.

  Augusten Burroughs

  Writing, People, Interesting

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 3, 2009.

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• I think action movies on the whole have moved more and more into large spectacle, even leaving out super hero movies that seem to me to be more a fantastic science fiction than they are action movies.

  Walter Hill

  Hero, Thinking, Leaving

  Source: collider.com

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• You are never alone in Afghanistan. You are always in the company of others, usually family. You don't understand yourself really as an individual, you understand yourself as part of something bigger than yourself. Family is so central to your identity, to how you make sense of your world, it is very dramatic, and therefore an amazing source of storytelling, a source of fiction for me.

  Khaled Hosseini

  Identity, World, Dramatic

  "The Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. May 21, 2013.

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• I think anything that opens my mind and triggers my imagination I'm reading. I like to read science fiction and imagine the character. Anything that keeps my imagination flowing.

  Nicolas Cage

  Reading, Character, Thinking

  "Nicolas Cage GHOST RIDER SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE On-Set Interview". Interview with Steve "Frosty" Weintraub, collider.com. January 5, 2012.

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• Well, good science fiction is intelligent. It asks big questions that are on people's minds. It's not impossible. It has some sort of root in the abstract. So automatically you're getting closer to potentially divine sources of interest because it is abstract. It's one of the only ways that a film actor can express himself in the abstract and have audiences still go along for the ride. They don't contend it. They accept it, that they're going to go places that are a bit more of the imagination, a bit more out there, and that's more and more where I like to dance.

  Nicolas Cage

  Intelligent, Roots, People

  "Knowing" Press conference, collider.com. March 18, 2009.

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• Horror is one of the few genres - romance and comedy are the other two that come to mind - that's all emotion-driven. It's not a rational genre, like science fiction is. It's irrational by nature. And it is capable of exploring all aspects of human experience.

  Stephen R. Bissette

  Two, Romance, Mind

  Interview with Chris Dahlen, www.avclub.com. July 23, 2009.

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• I don't think people are averse to thinking about things in a deep way, but we have limited time and opportunity to think about things in a deep way. I think that's why there is an appetite for non-fiction - it gives people the opportunity to reexamine ordinary experience and be smarter about it.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Opportunity, Thinking, People

  Interview with Donna Bowman, www.avclub.com. November 17, 2008.

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• I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.

  Willa Cather

  Women, Writing, Wine

  Willa Cather (1993). “Willa Cather”

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• Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.

  Aldous Huxley

  Mean, Civilization, Class

  Aldous Huxley (1955). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley”

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• If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are not a fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon the walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by the shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which were suspended there. We have not far to seek for living and unquestionable evidence. The very dust takes shape and confirms some story which we had read.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wall, War, Taken

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.178, Xist Publishing

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• It would be worth the while to select our reading, for books are the society we keep; to read only the serenely true; never statistics, nor fiction, nor news, nor reports, nor periodicals, but only great poems, and when they failed, read them again, or perchance write more. Instead of other sacrifice, we might offer up our perfect (teleia) thoughts to the gods daily, in hymns or psalms. For we should be at the helm at least once a day.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Book, Reading, Writing

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.83, Delphi Classics

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• The reason that truth is stranger than fiction is that fiction has to have a rational thread running through it in order to be believable, whereas reality may be totally irrational.

  Sydney J. Harris

  Running, Truth, Honesty

  Sydney J. Harris (1986). “Clearing the ground”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel.

  J. G. Ballard

  Technology, World, Branches

  "Crash". Book by J. G. Ballard, 1973.

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• The unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance. It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Unity, Sitting, Literature

  Edgar Allan Poe (2009). “Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe”, p.521, Springer Science & Business Media

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• ... if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us to break her and bullyher, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.

  Virginia Woolf

  Art, Criticism, And Love

  Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.12, Oxford University Press

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